By the way, I'm available for weddings, bar mitzvahs and fondue Saturdays for the truly desperate.

And here are some of my songs to prove it...

Malcolm Ian Connell - Reverb Nation.

My dirty shame.

  In my mid teens, I was terrified to come out as an - I won't say art lover but as someone simply deeply moved by art.

  I started drinking at a very young age.  I was around thirteen when I got sick for many weeks from alcohol poisoning but one of the great things about being a mid-teen alcoholic was the social negotiable accords that came with it.  I could capitalise on the tantrums when the pity failed and vice-versa so it was an inordinately beneficial loop once I learned how to pull the strings properly.

  One such act of manipulation was that I would tell everyone that I was going on a pub crawl with friends and everybody accepted my story because they knew that when it came to me and drinking, either I would win the argument or they would not.  And I would catch the 501 bus to the city and walk up to the NSW Gallery in the Domain.

  The revelation came when I stood in front of Georges Croegaert's 'Confidences' and wept unashamedly. For the Buddha and Chinoiserie.  For the beauty.  For the chiaroscuro. For the revelations intimated. For the satin and taffeta fabric.  For the amplified emotions and perfectly miniaturised world that Croegaert miraculously created.  You should realise that this painting is, in fact, less than fifty centimeters wide and seventy centimeters tall. If you can click and expand the picture above, do so and marvel.

  And then maybe get your arse to the Gallery and see it for yourself.  For I learned early on that prints (and later digital reproductions) can never do the real works an iota of justice. So you will be well rewarded throughout your long life for seeing these works of art even one time.

 Spencer Gore's 'Icknield Way' has exactly the same effect every time I'm fortunate enough to stand before it.  I cry.  I don't even like pink as a colour but this painting has arrested my complete attention for over thirty years.  I know nothing of art but I understand there is still some contention as to whether Gore was a post-Impressionist or formative Surrealist.  Frankly I don't care.  Gore to me is simply a stark reminder that if you do just one solitary thing in your life that transforms for the better the life of another human being, then you know?  That may be all you need to do. More important than that though, is to do what you love most.  Whenever possible.  Wherever possible. With passion.  With madness.  With terrifying amounts of unbridled joy.

  I've seen many works by many masters since but these are my earliest recollections of coming out.

  So gang, now you all know my shameful truth.

Summertime has come and gone. All used up with wishful thinking.

Breathe in

You breathe in 
and somewhere far off a drop of water splashes too loud and ruinous into an empty basin.
And somewhere far off a perfect contrail slowly dissolves in the mid afternoon sky.
And a bird swoops, confused and not at all sure what it may catch, if it catches anything.
Cars collide and people who were complete strangers in seconds past now swear like troopers. Like old friends might.
You breathe in and you can almost feel the flood coming back. The sheer toxic and biblical proportions for your unadulterated attention.
And the silence of the aftermath.
For your ears only.
A child cries and no one cares in this place where you breathe in.
Nations fold under corruption and mire and no one gives a solitary fuck in this second.
And bad people go on to rule good people and winter steals life from everything.
And you breathe in.
And finally. After a second. A long, tortuous and serpentine thought. A world. Lifetimes. The mere whisper of a laugh. A conspiracy that won't catch on. A TV rerun. A minute in the cold air. An eternity in a warm cradle.
Someone calls your name.
And you breathe out.
And say goodbye, fuck-knuckle.

Our very own Tom Sawyer.

A quick one for Jake.

  A lifetime - or several lifetimes - ago, I made a silent vow to myself that if I must fuck with peoples' heads, then I would do so in the best way possible and that is to enrich rather than diminish what I consider to be the better aspects of being human, such as curiosity, compassion, mercy, thoughtfulness and forbearance - in short, all those pesky qualities that denote something of virtue.  We live in a world where one is considered to be unsportspersonlike if they do not early on master the art of fucking with the heads of others.  We live too in a world where apologising is a forgotten art and people can no longer say the word 'sorry' let alone spell it or commit it to print.

  But I'm sorry.  Outside pinballs and skateboards, I was always crap at sports.

  ...

  Indulge me, then, the following non sequitur of logic.

...

  Possibly - just possibly - it's less than auspicious that my first blog article should revolve around the death of my dearest friend who passed away one week ago tonight.

  It's cold tonight.  His beautiful widow and fine sons are still struggling through the morass of confusion, shock and anger at his passing, to say nothing of the near-byzantine state of the finances. And the rest of us poor fools who knew him are lamenting and trying to laugh in the face of the loss. And posting photos of him on Facebook or songs we think he loved but more than likely he really didn't care about.  But that's hardly the point, is it?! WE can post songs that WE love and say that he loved them and who among the living would dispute it unless the error was so obviously egregious?!

  And besides, frankly so much of the stuff he loved was utter dross.  Especially his taste in 80s music.

  Back in the late 70s and early 80s he and I drank at our local pub in Ryde, Sydney and every night without fail someone would put Marvin Gaye's 'Sexual Healing' on the jukebox.  And every night I would swear that I would kick the living snot out of whoever did this, if ever I should catch them red handed.

  I know I telegraphed the punchline and you all clearly realise  who the culprit was, but it was the manner of Jake's revelation that still makes me smile.  First of all, at least two decades had to elapse before he would laughingly reveal to me that it was in fact him who kept playing the tune.  And secondly, he revealed a  reason why which shows his Machiavellian mind in full flight.  He knew I would always counter this musical transgression by playing at least five songs so as to rinse the audial taste out of my ears, if that doesn't mangle any metaphors too much. And that he frankly liked the choices I made, whether it was a song by Midnight Oil (I don't wanna be the one), The Squeeze (or UK Squeeze as they were billed here in Australia), the Cure (Killing an Arab), Ian Dury and the Blockheads (Sex and drugs and rock and roll), The Church (Unguarded Moment/Bus Driver), The Clash (Tommy Gun), The Jam (Town Called Malice/Ghosts) and so the list goes on.

  You see? He had the whole Pavlovian thing down pat even back then.  He would call with what I considered to be the worst offering a genius like Marvin Gaye could ever produce and I would respond faithfully with half a dozen punk or post punk tracks.  Not bad value for the price of one song, all things considered.

  Using this twisted logic on life and how to abuse it then, it's only fair that I should open my blog with a tragic and senseless death.

  Goodbye my brother - Brett Andrew Jacobson (20th October 1964 - 13th July 2014).

  We'll always be as thick as thieves.